The American people’s collective inability to overcome commercial illusion and confront the grim realities of the economic and environmental crises means they will remain slaves to fiction and its apocalyptic outcomes, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges told Paul Jay on The Real News Network’s new show, “Reality Asserts Itself.”

A description of the lives of Polynesian islanders in Melville’s book “Typee” shows that the inhumanities of capitalism visible today and constantly attacked by Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges were plainly recognized in American literature of the mid-19th century.

Happily aloft in the vicinity of my father’s hat, and the weather having cleared since the Ohioan missed its compass heading, I was free to form my earliest impression of the sea at a safe and sunny distance, lulled by the sound of waves breaking on the beach, delighting in the drift of gulls in a bright blue sky.